September 17, 2004

Beyond Google

Google's marketing and financial success crowns it as the current king of the search hill, but that does not mean there are no contenders for the crown. Here are a couple a couple of search engines that are not really new, but have became more popular, judging by their traffic and the references they pick up in blogs. I would give these guys a run, just out of appreciation for the sheer determination they display in getting into an arena crowded by giants. Well, on a closer inspection, one of them is actually backed by a giant. In any case, these two believe that they have something new to offer in a realm where most of us are quite happy with what we already have.

One search mechanism that is the latest buzz is Blinkx.com. Blinkx (Ah! Whatever happened to meaningful names like Google!) was started by a Microsoft employee, who met Bill Gates and "realized to her horror that she barely understood anything he was talking about" (ThisIsMoney.com). She made a decision to learn more about technology, in case she runs into Bill Gates again. This may yet happen, if I correctly read the strategy of the search engine she founded last year - Blinkx.

Blinks turns dedicated search into a continuous offering of relevant links. Relevant to - well, relevant to the documents you write, relevant to emails you sends, relevant to web pages you surf, too. It is not a web site, like Google, but an ever-present application - currently for the PC, and a Mac version is under work. Blinkxs' (sorry about that) strength is in making search transparent - more a hidden potential hovering at the background.

Another relatively new face on the block is A9.com. A9 (Ah! Whatever happened to meaningful names like... well, Blinkx!) is the latest chapter in the saga of meta-search engines, an idea raised since the mid-90's. Only here it is presented with a twist that has to do with its owner. The "A" in "A9" stands for Amazon, and it has the familiar Amazon swoosh/smile below its logo. A9 really stands apart in offering Amazon "search inside this book" search results - throw a search phrase in, get books that include that phrase in their content.

Naturally, A9 offers regular search results, too - Google search results from web pages, Google image search results, Internet Movie Database search results, reference search results, and results of searches from your own bookmarks - which you can keep and manage online. A9 remembers what search result you have already seen, and marks them accordingly. The page layout is pretty dynamic and configurable, and just for that it is worth a look.

I only hope this trend with search engine names stops somewhere. Yahoo! still meant something, Google took a step further towards cheerful unrelated-ness, Blinkx took one more step towards abandoning both meaning and spelling and now A9 - well, can you get more minimal than this? I hope not. Perhaps it's a sign that we have grown so used to having search capabilities right near the tip of our fingers, that we now regard them more as features, less as entities.

Comments

I've given both A9 and blinkx a good try out over the last couple of weeks. A9 is fairly good. I already use Amazon and also IMBD for movie search. It's great for searching images. It's quite simply designed and has the same Amazon feel. I wasn’t overly impressed, it’s something I might use on occasion when looking up images. Blinkx on the other hand surprised me very much. It searches all files and documents on my computer, MP3s, email, web, news and video. It's altogether a smart little application. It took a while longer than A9 to get used to all the features - but well worth looking at.

I tried google desktop, Lookout, A9 and copernic, and Blinkx is by far the cream of the crop. It uses implicit query, finding similar material on the web, in your email, or on your hard drive, then sorts it. It uses the new “smart folders” concept to automatically index any documents you view into folders by the way you set them up. not to mention p2p- nice knowing you, kazaa...